Monday, March 13, 2017

The Spirit of Flight

Reading
Djelloul Marbrook’s Riding Thermals to Winter Grounds

Leaky Boot Press (UK), 114 pp, $14.99,
ISBN: 978-1-909849-27-3

Publication date: APRIL 10, 2017

By Kevin
Swanwick

Djelloul
Marbrook's latest poetry collection offers us a flying gaggle of poems that
invoke rich, abstract paintings. Those familiar with the late Middle Age
Christian mystical work, The Cloud of Unknowing, may find a postmodern
abstract expression of its central ideas in this work. And we are reacquainted
with a fantasy most of us experience in early childhood: taking flight and
gliding over life, arms stretched.

“Riding
Thermals,” the title poem, suggests what we might see from above and raises
many questions. Perhaps instead of standing in places of dread, we might fly
over them and having grown wings, move on to a far point, like Montauk, in a
great escape.

…Turn off
the radio,

lock the
doors, put the trash in the street;

the fair
means to Montauk

grow out
of my shoulder blades.

These poems
are full of inversions, carrying a sense of consequence about being here
instead of there. Questions are asked. How much of my path is determined
by me versus the actions of others or by pervasive, but often denied, forces of
nature? Once we’ve taken to the fantasy of flight, so much more is possible and
the magical becomes real. This new aerial foothold is used in delightful ways
to conjure relations across vast time and space.

From “Diet
of whales”:

Apologies, anchovy,

a caper’s not your pearl

and with a sop of bread you help
me

remember when I was the diet of
whales

Part two of
the collection, titled Deuteronomy 23:2, establishes the outsider’s
perspective, unaccepted, while juxtaposing the pain of rejection with the
detachment of a camera lens. Sometimes the dreamer-conscience is addressed by
its awakened host and offered observations on the role that dreams and memory
play, like surrealist paintings full of subconscious distortions.

From “Wary
greetings”:

We are strangers even to our
fondest memories

and they have conflated
themselves and learned

to ambush what our eyes first saw

on its journey to the brain.
Memories become

guerrillas fighting for a cause…

But the
dreamer must be protected and allowed to roam free as in “Other sleeplessness
to do”:

…Sleep

unsure of anything but that you
fell asleep

and may wake up in my arms

if you climb the rope of dreams,

and if you fall it won’t be

the first time I loitered
foolishly.

As with
flight, a strong sense of movement pervades this work. Sharp alliteration and
rhythms reveal how we struggle to carry emotional baggage from our damaged
pasts while comporting ourselves to established standards. Inescapably, we wonder
if it is fakery or compassion at any given moment, heroic or pitiful. From “Savage
in your compassion”:

You you you ululating, galaxies
of remembrances,

explain why I sit back to walls
in cafés of other worlds…

…lying to shapeshifting
emissaries

about what I do and do not see,

assuring them of my complete
attention while

bestiaries and aviaries of where
I have been riot

behind the wall…

…one imposter to another imposing
calm, pretending all is well

assuring them our ghostly luggage
is resolved and put away

but knowing we are stopgap
measures, chaos boarded up,

left behind, looting in the
streets, opportunity spurned

because we had lives to live in
the clearings up ahead.

To disdain the soaking woods for
the clearing is the peril

of forgetting why you live, a
grabber’s game,

a collector’s loss…

The poem “Jerusalem” imagines our
long genetic past and its potential determinism. As a prayer-poem, the poet
represents, textually, the shape of a chalice and offers a form of absolution
to the struggling conscience.

The past is not my eminent
domain,

it was taken by corsairs to
Tripoli

or removed by Turks to Istanbul…

Domain’s as evil as a name;

neither belongs to us; they're
sticks

picked up to help us manage hard
terrain…

Jerusalem’s where we go to divest
our business interests,

otherwise we haven’t got a
prayer.

Section
three, Beyond Montauk, completes the architecture of a long journey.
There is an arriving, but not an end. The journey into unknowing will continue
but on a last stop, there is a sweet look at where a young, tender kiss could
have gone, in “Beyond Montauk”:

We should
have gone on to Babylon

to see a
movie, not swim

in each
other’s eyes.

This
collection had me grabbing for the dictionary to fully engage its erudite
canvas of themes from the early Common Era, bringing together history, art and
the perspective of a long spiritual quest. Bravo.

*

Kevin
Swanwick resides in the Hudson Valley of New York with his wife, two children,
mother- in-law and three dogs. He finds the world a terribly complex place and
likes to write about it from the perspective of a grateful citizen of Carthage
who got to watch the Romans invade but was spared because of his accidental
usefulness. His essays and some fiction can be found in Elephant Journal, The Strange
Recital and on his blog, in no particular order.